Northwest Jacqueline
by Mondo47
Summary: A sci-fi western set in the Mass Effect universe.
1. Synopsis

Northwest Jacqueline

Synopsis

_"2190. The Alliance frontier settlement of Northwest Edge; a small farming community on the storm-torn desert planet of McCrae's World. Population 207. Its most enigmatic resident is Jacqueline Carter; a woman no-one knows, whose life is nothing but whispers and rumour, and who may very well be a murderer. A local marshal and a colony engineer plan to discover the truth behind Jacqueline's appearance on McCrae's World; each for their own reasons and each with an agenda beyond simple curiosity. However the tornado season is fast approaching, and this year the winds will bring more destruction and death than anyone could expect to Northwest Edge, and unleash the hidden fury of the mysterious Jacqueline on an unsuspecting world..."_


	2. Chapter 1

1.

_McCrae's World, 2188_

Ramona Carter exhaled steam into McCrae's cold night air.

The planet had never been an obvious place for a colony to take root; a filthy-looking ball of rust red and cloudy blue slowly rolling through the Francisco system along the fringes of the Voyager Cluster. The first Alliance survey vessels had assumed the world had promise, looking down on the vast oceans from orbit. The waters however were saline to a near-toxic level, rapidly killing all but the hardiest of indigenous life. The surfaces of the oceans were prone to acrid blooms of poisonous algae than fed enormous filter-feeding monstrosities the first pioneers nicknamed 'Cisco whales; creatures held aloft in the water only by the extreme salinity and that had no respect for desalination platforms or their crews, sweeping them destructively aside as they fed. The local fauna inland was no less respectful or hospitable of the first colonists.

The four major continents were largely desert wastelands of red, orange and purple stone dotted with spectacular towering buttes, gaping canyons and mountain ranges. The equally rugged, salt-crusted coastlines were wracked by seasonal storms that were capable of tearing apart prefabricated colony structures in a matter of minutes. The tornadoes would howl inland twice yearly, and the first eight colony locations on the planet were rendered untenable within a single solar year. As the colonists travelled further inland they found valleys and basins which held both fertile soil and underground reserves of fresh water. These were sheltered enough from the summer and winter storm cycles by the mountains to allow colonies to finally take root on the parched world.

Sometimes a powerful squall would move far enough inland to force the colonists to take to underground shelters, but it had only happened on a handful of occasions since the settling of the bountiful 'green zones'. But while McCrae's midday sun was intolerable, and its night was cold enough to freeze the unprepared, the main colony of Barratt's Landing was thriving, with a growing population of almost eleven thousand. The outlying townships and farms boosted the global population to almost fourteen thousand; the entire colony operation resembling tiny scattered diamonds alone in the bleak, undeveloped wilderness. It had been this isolation in part that had brought the old woman to McCrae's World.

Ramona's water farm sat in the midst of this hard, wild land; little more than a trio of prefab buildings, the underground water plant and a machine shop and barn constructed from prefabricated segments and spray concrete nestled against a tall rock formation. She looked down from her farmhouse porch on the clifftops, little more than a crude deck of stonepear tree wood, at the distant spots of bright blue that marked the settlement of Northwest Edge. Swaddled against the cold in a heavy night-coat and hat, she fumbled to ignite her cigarette with an antique fuel lighter and wedge it in her dry lips. She huffed the smoke into her lungs painfully, coughed out bluish smoke with her hot white breath, and brushed her long grey hair from her eyes with a gloved hand. Down in the distant smear of lamplight she knew there were a couple of hundred souls who didn't care in the slightest about the old lady on the cliffs, which suited her just fine.

She'd never been much of a people-person, and had only wanted to try and claw together a small profit on the cost of the water-farming equipment she had bought with her retirement pay from the Alliance medical corps, not that money was even important to her anymore. As long as Ramona pumped the water down to reservoir no-one bothered her, and other than her monthly trips into town to get supplies and spare parts, she had no-one to disrupt her days of watching her stonepear trees fruit and her nights of stargazing, reading and smoking her homegrown tobacco supply. She was more than content to allow her seventies to ebb into eighties as far away from the rest of the human race as she could manage.

Ramona reached over for her rifle and looked down at Northwest Edge through the scope. She could make out the greenish smudge that was the front of Dacey's store, and the red blinking lights that marked the location of old Callum's bar. She occasionally visited Callum's watering hole, as the old Irishman was the only other person in the colony approaching her age. She quite liked him, despite her disdain for other people. Su Dacey on the other hand was a busybody who never shut up. Ramona kept her interactions with the general store owner to grunts and curse-words, because she loved the sight of the young woman wrinkling her nose at the old bird's deliberate rudeness.

Other lights shone from the prefab homes of the families that lived in the green zone, radiating out from the central community landing pad and fuel depot in arcs. Ramona tracked past them to the field fence towers, each capped by a winking white lantern. The fence was only there to keep the pebblebacks out of the crops. Pebblebacks were hulking native animals with armoured hides and horned faces that slowly wandered the desert on legs as thick as treetrunks. An adult weighed in excess of eight tons, and without the fence a lone pebbleback could stomp through a harvest in minutes to grub out any juicy roots with their long, pick-like snouts. Despite being as large as a heavy-hauler, the pebblebacks were fairly harmless, and could be shooed off with a little shouting if one was feeling brave or a strong electrical jolt, but if one of them became aggressive enough someone would have to break out a grenade launcher and deal with the creature before it became a risk to the colony. No other weapons made an impression on the beasts' three-inch-thick skins.

Almost on cue, there was a bright flare from the fences as a stray animal, invisible in the darkness, brushed against the wires. Ramona rested the gun back on her lap, content that nothing was disturbing the order of her world, and blew two streams of smoke out of her nostrils. She closed her eyes and relaxed into the battered old shuttle cockpit chair she used for her porch-seat and listened to the night tick slowly on towards morning, no sounds but the hum of the generators, the steady chug of the water pumps and the distant yowls of varren, comfortable in the knowledge that tonight was just like the night before, and that night like the night before that.

She felt herself beginning to doze off, and contemplated returning indoors. Ramona had been sat out here for almost seven hours by her reckoning, doing nothing other than watching the sun set behind the distant mountains in the east and their giant shadows sweep over the valley. Some nights she would sleep in her chair until sunrise. While she knew that her own fences would keep the feral varren out and that her coat would stop her from getting exposure, it wasn't wise to get too comfortable outdoors after dark. The remains of her cigarette stuck to her wizened lips, Ramona groused and began to heave herself out of the pilot's seat, the bulky coat trapping her between the arms like a man sitting in a child's school chair.

Something caught her eye as she looked skyward. She squinted up, remembering the paths the local satellite relays drifted in and knowing what she had seen was outside of the usual movement spots. _Meteor_, she thought. Ramona scanned the heavens until she saw the newcomer amongst the familiar stars; a small guttering pinpoint in the southern sky. She reached for her rifle again without taking her eyes from the light, squinted into the scope and tracked with the object. Whatever it was, it was way too slow to be a shooting star. The light altered course twice; first hard right, then left in a lazy sweep. It was too high to be a flyer from Barratt's Landing or one of the larger settlements, and anything bigger than a commercial cargo ship or small frigate would set off the main colony's security network, filtering warnings back to the settlement VIs about the arrival of potential hostiles. Ramona watched the object jink left and right again, bemused by the hyperactive aerobatics. Finally the light became static, and began to grow steadily larger. Whatever it was, it was coming down somewhere in the area.

Still peering through the lens, she tapped the comm unit over her left ear, holding the rifle as best she could with one hand. Su Dacey's husband was a radio enthusiast, and was usually awake most nights jabbering to anyone willing to listen to him. He also owned one of the three VI interfaces in the settlement, so perhaps he had some idea what the thing was. Ramona cycled the frequencies with a series of taps on the comm's sensor, but found nothing but static. _Useless friggin' thing._ She cursed aloud and returned her attention to the rifle. The moving light was gone. Ramona swept the sky, altering the magnification, but there was no sign of the object. She gave a little snort of derision, and lowered the weapon from her eyes.

The light immediately returned to her field of vision. It was about three times the size it had been a moment before and seemingly coming directly at Ramona's farm like a guided missile. She stepped off the porch, the rife slipping from her suddenly-slack fingers. As the seconds passed the blob of light became larger and larger, developing a clear, boxy outline. It was definitely some kind of small craft; edges dappled with orange and its rear spitting blue and green sparks. Something flared on the craft's surface and Ramona heard a distant _woomph_ as something exploded. It wasn't landing – it was crashing. The ship swept over the farm a couple of hundred feet above the surface, air shrieking around it and the fire on its skin lighting the porch for a moment like it was catching the morning sunrise, then it was gone, somewhere off to the north. She braced herself for the inevitable explosion, but none came, the ship must have travelled far enough into the wilds to stop her hearing the crash.

Ramona was suddenly wide awake, heart thumping at her old ribs. She quickly shrugged off the night-coat and wide-brimmed hat, the instant rush of cold air on her chest and arms slapping her senses sharp. She trotted across the main yard to the barn, tying her hair back as she went, and climbed into the cab of her gopher. The heavy six-wheeled truck's combustion engine barked into life, huge headlamps burning into the blackness like lasers. Ramona coasted the gopher out and turned onto the dirt track that led to the fence gate. The vehicle rattled towards the eight-foot metal portal, which rapidly swung out on automated motors and clattered shut once again once the gopher had passed. Looking over the instruments, she brought up a navigation map of the northern plain and gunned the truck out into the darkness.

Ramona trundled about in the night for almost an hour before the gopher's drilling sensor began to give a shrill beeping sound. Flicking a couple of grubby rubber-sheathed switches the nav display showed a sizable deposit of surface metal where she knew there were none. Ramona swung the truck towards it, and the searchlights soon lit up the smouldering outline of a boxy interstellar shuttle; thirty feet of coffin-shaped black metal, the side visibly sheared open and the flat nose ground into the desert rock, behind it lay a few hundred yards of impact trench, studded with small fires. While she was no expert the craft looked turian in design; the tail-end still bearing two of a quartet of stubby wings; the third was missing completely, the other was sticking out of the ground like a tombstone a dozen yards from the wreck. There were no insignias on the ship's surface though, which was usually a sign that a vessel belonged to one of the smaller privateer clans that occasionally drifted through the system. Ramona suddenly became painfully aware her rifle was still lying on the farmhouse porch.

Ramona hopped down from the gopher's cab, armed as best as she was able with a two foot truck wrench she kept under the gopher's driver's seat. While she was fairly certain wild varren would not come near the brilliant lights from the vehicle's headlamps, whoever had piloted the shuttle was another matter. She carefully picked her way over the torn-up ground, avoiding a hefty chuck of burning fuselage and slid down into the rent the shuttle had gouged in the orange sand.

She slipped and found herself knee-deep in white, oozing crash foam, spilling out of the gash in the craft's side like blood from an animal carcass. Tendrils of sooty smoke crawled out to sting at her eyes and nose. The tear passed right through both hulls, and peering inside Ramona could see the interior of the vessel was a mess of sparking cables, small fires and overturned components. A couple of empty medigel canisters poked out of the debris. Squeezing herself in a little further she could just about make out two pilot's chairs at the far end of the single compartment; one was bent backwards almost ninety degrees, the seat padding aflame, the other was swung around to face her. Something red glistened wetly on the arms and headrest. Ramona eased herself back out of the rent in the hull and waded through the foam towards where the forward hatch should be, her hands wrapped tight around the wrench.

The hatch was open, sticking up into the air like an absurdly large rabbit's ear. Ramona leaned over the threshold, feeling the heat wafting over her from the inside, though it was far from comforting. There was no sign of anyone inside the disordered cockpit. There was another smear of human-looking blood on the inner frame of the hatch, which she tried to ignore. She waved a coil of smoke away from her face and then noticed a blue hump among the debris on the shuttle floor. She cocked her head to one side and squinted at the shape, its outline oddly familiar somehow. Ramona took a step into the ruined cockpit, easing herself by the bloody pilot's seat, and prodded at the object with her improvised weapon. It rolled over easily, one side opened up like a cracked eggshell.

The incinerated face of a turian gazed up at her sightlessly. While the impact and fire might well have been the cause of the burns, Ramona was not so sure the crash had killed the alien. The chest of the turian's armour was caved in by weapon fire, the numerous pockmarks suggesting a point-blank shotgun blast. She took a step back towards the hatch, turned and found the bloody muzzle of a large-bore gun staring cyclops-like into her face. Just beyond the weapon's blunt outline Ramona could barely make out the figure holding the firearm. A hand and arm trailed away towards the dark form, the limb painted entirely crimson with blood, so much she could see it dripping at the slim wrist. Ramona swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry as the desert outside. She carefully lowered the wrench, letting it slip to the ground with a clatter. The gun wavered drunkenly in front of her. Her lips parted, she cleared her throat as best she could, and she spoke.

"Now hold on a second," Ramona said.

The shotgun barked once, and the chill desert dark bloomed into a brilliant burning white light.


End file.
